We study a gas of bosonic dipolar atoms in the presence of a transverse harmonic trapping potential by using an improved variational Bethe ansatz, which includes the transverse width of the atomic cloud as a variational parameter. Our calculations show that the system behavior evolves from quasi-one dimensional to a strictly one-dimensional one by changing the atom-atom interaction, or the axial density, or the frequency of the transverse confinement. Quite remarkably, in the droplet phase induced by the attractive dipolar interaction the system becomes sub-one dimensional when the transverse width is smaller than the characteristic length of the transverse harmonic confinement.